On the Queen, Water Bodies and Blogging in the Dark...

I am sitting in a small hotel room on the Saanich Penninsula -- near Victoria. Hence the Queen. The true Queen is asleep behind me in her bed, replenishing and readying herself for excellence at a swim meet tomorrow. She is here to swim (and socialize, of course) and I am here to write in my usual, hermit-like fashion.

I am the world's worst swim parent. I emerge from my cocoon only long enough to cheer on my own child and she races the clock, and then it's back to head buried in current wip. No team spirit at all, actually. Horrifying.

I have just been weeping, a little, reading Meg Tilly's blog. I first met Meg in the flesh at Book Expo earlier this year in Toronto, and we run into each other rather more often these days. I am about one chapter away from finishing her latest book, PORCUPINE, which I will review here shortly. But tonight was my first experience with her blogging persona. And I can tell you -- what you see is what you get with this writer. I LOVED reading her blog. Meg is a most interesting person, with a quite remarkable (and somewhat public) history, but what she is best at, hands down -- is writing. The Meg she writes is the Meg she is -- or as close to it as the one I've met, anyway.

All this by way of saying, if you'd like to add a beautiful read to your blog list, google yourself The Official Meg Tilly.com and it will take you to her website. Add her blog to your RSS feed or your Reader or whatever. Really a joy to read.

Oh, and not at all weepy...it's just that Meg's youngest son is the same age as my daughter, and we are both facing the weird reality of the Impending Launch of of one's offspring into the great unknown of the real world. A truly startling phenomena, in much the way a knife neatly slicing out a piece of one's heart must be. An astonishingly sudden event, considering 18 full years have passed in what feels like a heart beat, or a hair's breadth, or wahtever space of time is faster than an instant. This is, of course, complicated by the standard social nicety one faces encompassing the general unacceptibility of bursting into tears in public places for no apparent reason, particularly in front of said offspring, now fully grown but not beyond the humiliation of parental embarrassment.

Perhaps that is what I will cling to -- she may be all grown up, but no one can embarrass her the way her mother can.

Anyway -- you must read Meg's blog. She clearly rocks not only as a writer but as a parent. And is more eloquant, to boot. (She, for example, would never use the expression -- to boot. I am quite sure of that.)

~kc